Life in the new jail was a little easier because it looked like we were finally headed toward a trial. Calvin visited a handful of times, always asking something new about the case. Eventually I met his colleague Lydia. She asked pointed questions and took copious notes. Though she hadn’t tried a capital case either, something about her gave me confidence. She had been with Calvin when they spoke to Sebesta about the direction of my case.
“Anthony,” Calvin began at the start of one of our meetings. “Before we proceed, I have something to tell you. You might not want to hear this, but Sebesta has offered you a life sentence.”
I was angry. I’d contemplated what a trial might look like, but I hadn’t thought about a plea. The gravity of my situation slammed against me when Calvin uttered the word “life.” I rejected the offer as quickly as it came.
“You tell Sebesta he can take that life sentence and stick it in his redneck ass. I’m not taking a day for something I didn’t do.”
“Anthony, listen, you didn’t do this.” Her words were reassuring. “You don’t have to take any deal they offer.”
I explained to her that I wasn’t going to entertain anything other than my freedom. I had been in jail for more than a year, but I remained resolute. If the state intended to take my freedom, they would have to do it in a trial.
My attorneys must have gotten the message. They quickly tabled the offer. I returned to my cell, smarting at the gall of Sebesta. If he believed I had killed a family, he didn’t know me. And if he thought I’d give away my life for a crime I didn’t commit, he certainly didn’t know me.
Sebesta seemed desperate for some piece of evidence he could hang his case on. After all this time, he still had little more than Robert Carter’s testimony. Eventually, however, his prodding uncovered something more concrete: a knife. Calvin brought news that Sebesta’s find had come from an unlikely source.
“Anthony, Sebesta has taken possession of a knife from your friend Roy Allen,” he said. “Sebesta’s claiming that the knife matches the stab wounds of the victims.” Roy Allen had told investigators that he’d given me the knife’s twin from a ceremonial kit he had purchased.
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I explained to Calvin that the kit knife was so cheap, it had broken within a few months. It wouldn’t have been capable of cutting butter, much less murdering someone.
“Well, they seem to think that the knife you had could have been the murder weapon,” Calvin said.
Again I saw how the case against me was being crafted out of thin air, with people I knew and items I possessed being squeezed to fit the prosecution’s mosaic. The state was working in reverse, starting with the conclusion that I was guilty, then picking through my life for anything that could be made to fit its narrative.
“Get out of here with that,” I insisted. “I don’t even know where that knife is!”
“Do you think you can find it?” Calvin asked, visibly concerned. He knew that if we could locate the actual knife in question, we could present it as evidence that I had been nowhere near the crime scene. But if we couldn’t, then the state might very well use that to grip the malleable minds of the jury. Eventually Calvin calmed down. Maybe he wanted to reassure me.
“It ain’t no big deal,” he said. “They can’t even prove you owned a knife.”
I went back to my cell and put pen to paper. The discussion with Calvin had brought back memories of my girlfriend prior to Yolanda, whom I hadn’t spoken to in quite some time. She had been around when I had the old knife. I thought that maybe if I got in touch with her, she could put her hands on it. We’d then be able to show just how flimsy the knife was and that it certainly hadn’t been used in a rash of killings. I handed my letter to Steve, the jailer I had come to trust. That was a mistake. He delivered it, but not to my ex. He instead took it to Charles Sebesta. I never heard from the girl, and we never found the knife.
Calvin was furious. “Didn’t I tell you they couldn’t prove you owned a knife?” he asked in a tone I hadn’t heard from him before. “Now that you’ve gone and written a letter that they intercepted, they have proof that you did own a knife.”
I had wanted to catch the state in a lie, but as it happened, they’d caught me in one. I had testified months earlier that I’d never owned a knife, not intending to mislead anyone. Based on the letter, the state would now be able to paint me as a liar and use that to sway a jury against me.
Calvin urged me not to write any more letters. “Just let it alone!” he said. “They don’t have anything on you, and they’re grasping at straws.”
I assured him I’d let it rest. The last thing I wanted was to help the state in its case against me.
FEBRUARY 1994:
ROBERT CARTER’S TRIAL
BY THE TIME ROBERT CARTER’S case went to trial, in January 1994, I had been in jail for almost a year and a half, and my own case seemed stuck in the mud. Carter’s trial promised to get things moving.
I knew the proceedings would weigh heavily on my own. I couldn’t be there in person, so I had to rely on my attorney to keep me updated. Every day I imagined what might be happening in the courtroom. Was Sebesta going after Carter like he’d gone after me? What were the witnesses saying? Would they succeed in putting Carter on death row?
The news from Calvin wasn’t great.
“During the trial, Scotty testified against Carter,” Calvin told me. “He told the court that he heard you and Carter talking. He said Carter admitted to you his role in the murders.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth. I was surprised and disappointed in Scotty, but as I look back, I now understand how someone in Scotty’s position could look for a way out. I do not blame that on Scotty; I blame it on a criminal justice system set out to win instead of achieving justice. What actually happened is that my interaction with Carter from the time of my arrest had been extremely limited. Apart from my initial plea to him to tell the truth, when I’d been placed across from his holding cell, our only exchanges had occurred just before and after his grand jury testimony, when he’d assured me that he was telling the truth, against his attorney’s will and advice, and that his attorney said they’d probably now release me.
Only later did I learn that Carter had testified that neither of us had had anything to do with the crime—he’d claimed that he too was innocent. Now, considering Scotty’s lie in court during Carter’s trial, I became more concerned. There never was any other conversation between Carter and me beyond this, and there’s no way anyone could have heard what Scotty said he’d overheard—because it had simply never happened. If Scotty had lied once in an attempt at making a deal, he might do so again, to my serious detriment.
Meanwhile, my attorney had questions for me.
“Why would Carter have told all those lies about what happened that night?” he asked.
I understood Calvin’s purpose in asking the question. He was trying to divine a motive so that he might attack Carter on the stand. And he asked, just as I had asked, because Carter’s insistent lies had come screeching out of right field like a baseball flung from some crow-hopper trying to beat a runner at home. I had no connection with Robert Carter. The only reason he knew my name was because of my cousin Cookie, who was seven years older than me. She’d grown up around me and my siblings, but by the time the crime had taken place, we were grown and had moved on with our lives. She had married Carter without my knowledge. At this point, Carter had told a number of conflicting stories. I was hanging on to his grand jury testimony stating that I had nothing to do with the crime. I was confident that he would now stick to the truth, but Calvin, being a defense attorney, wasn’t so sure.
There are only so many hours a man can spend thinking about the details of his case. It’s only natural to repeat the important plays over and over, like the owner of lost property retracing her steps or a losing quarterback thinking about the throws he might have made. My thinking led me to certain conclusions about the bizarr
e way I’d been treated in jail. Suddenly I understood why I’d been moved out of the two-man cell with Angel and into an already-occupied space with Scotty. The state wanted information, and they saw my relationship with Scotty as an opportunity to get it. Scotty had been in on the setup.
On February 11, I lay on the floor of my cell waiting on some news of the trial’s outcome. Later that day, an officer walked by, a mocking grin on his face. It wasn’t strange to see those expressions, but his especially caught my eye. He paused briefly at my door.
“You know they just gave your friend Carter a death sentence?” he asked. “Are you getting scared now?” He chortled and strolled along. The callous way he talked about death was startling. I’m not sure how I expected to feel. I’d never known anyone sentenced to death. As certain as I was about my own innocence, I was that uncertain about his. I hoped he was guilty, because I didn’t want to confront the reality that the state might actually execute an innocent man. If Carter was a killer, I was angry to have been linked to him, even in passing by a smirking officer.
I called my attorney. “Calvin, it’s Anthony. I just heard from an officer that they convicted Carter and gave him the death penalty.”
“Yes, it’s true,” Calvin said, as if he’d been expecting that very outcome. He told me he’d be in to see me sometime during the week.
I let Calvin know that the officer had taunted me. He told me to hang in there. As if I had any other option.
As it turned out, Carter’s case hadn’t given us much to go on. Calvin told me that the state had focused almost exclusively on Carter’s burn marks. Carter’s attorneys had tried to put the crime on me, but the jury still returned a guilty verdict. It wasn’t the best news, but Calvin did have something promising to share with me: he had secured a trial date. Calvin and Sebesta would be arguing over my life sometime in October 1994, only six months away.
Calvin explained that I might be brought to court for a few pretrial motions before then. I was grateful that things were beginning to happen. Going to court certainly beat sitting in jail all day. It wouldn’t be long until I had an opportunity to prove my innocence, and although that is backwards (the defendant should not have to prove anything), I welcomed the chance. Maybe too much. Back in my cell, thinking about the events to come, I was reminded of something my grandmother had told me when I was a boy. Be careful what you ask for, she’d say, because you just might get it. I’d been asking for a trial, and a trial was what I got.
AUGUST 1994:
TWO YEARS SINCE ARREST
CALVIN HAD PREPARED ME well for the parade of pretrial motions to come. In the 1990s in Texas, it was up to the defense to make a motion to get information from the prosecution. Our motions would be argued in Brenham, my hometown.
It was a half hour or so from the new Caldwell jail down to Brenham. The route cut across a dusty nowhere, through farmland and a slice of Americana that had been abandoned during the urbanization of Texas. It also passed through Somerville, the scene of the crime for which I stood accused. Momma had told me that the house where the victims had been stabbed and burned was visible from the road. I was as curious as anyone about where it had all gone down, and during the drive to Brenham in August 1994, I searched for a burnt house among the town’s other crumbling homes.
Nearly a quarter of Somerville’s residents at the time lived beneath the poverty line. Maybe the town had cleaned up the mess after the fire. Perhaps I’d just missed it. I certainly wasn’t about to disclose my curiosity to the officer at the wheel. I never did spot the house. The irony was striking. In a few short weeks, I’d be facing the fight of my life. The state would present exacting details on what I’d supposedly done and how I’d done it. And I couldn’t even spot the crime scene while driving past it.
I found Calvin waiting at the courthouse counsel table. The transporting officer led me to my seat in handcuffs. Calvin asked that the cuffs be removed. The officer complied. We sat there, waiting on the judge, talking about the details of my case and his expectations for the hearing.
“I’ve been talking to Sebesta,” he said. “He still doesn’t know whether Carter will be testifying against you. He says they’re still talking to him.”
“I hope he does,” I told Calvin. “I just can’t see that man looking me in the face and lying on me.”
“Anthony, I can tell you this,” Calvin said in a serious tone, “if they get him to testify, you better believe he’ll be testifying against you.”
As I look back on it, of course it made sense that the DA wouldn’t risk putting Carter on the stand unless he knew that his testimony would aid the state’s case. But I didn’t see it that way at the time. I knew Carter had lied before, but he’d done so in the quiet recesses of back rooms, probably under unthinkable pressure from the Rangers. It was my contention that even if Carter didn’t experience some moral renaissance, his conscience would get the better of him if he had to face me in a courtroom.
“Just be prepared, Anthony.”
But I wasn’t prepared for Calvin’s next revelation: Sebesta had been talking about pushing my trial back, to January, after the local elections.
“Look, man, I’ve been in jail for almost two years,” I said, my voice rising in frustration. “If he says he’s got a case, then let’s go to trial!”
Calvin looked at me blankly, as if he’d conceded the fight for control of the case to Sebesta. It was clear that Sebesta was calling the shots. Calvin had been reduced to a highly paid courier.
I knew we were up against a lot. But I wanted to get on living or dying, and a trial was the only way to do that. I urged Calvin to tell the judge that we were ready to go to trial. He agreed. He would press Sebesta on the earlier trial date.
I knew Calvin was unsure whether he was actually ready to go to trial, and I could sense his trepidation when he spoke in court. It was a big case, a capital murder case. Nevertheless, appearing before the judge, Calvin asked the state to turn over its evidence and contested the change in trial date. In the end, we got everything we wanted: the trial date would remain as assigned and Sebesta was ordered to turn over to us whatever evidence he had.
Before I left the court to return to jail, Calvin stated the obvious: “Don’t say anything to the officer on your way back. He’ll probably record the conversation. They can and will do anything to gain an advantage over you.”
As it happened, we were only a few miles clear of Brenham when the officer transporting me back to jail struck up a conversation. His tone was cordial as he expressed an interest in my case and discussed his version of the facts, asking me the who’s and what’s and why’s. Though remaining quiet was in my best interests, I didn’t see much harm in answering his questions, although he seemed to lose interest after a few minutes; maybe he realized my words weren’t going to be helpful to whoever had asked him to pick my brain.
Time dragged on in the new jail just as it had in the old. Some cases take a long time to get to trial because the evidence is so complex that lawyers on both sides need to conduct costly investigations. My case lagged for the opposite reason. The statesmen who framed the Constitution weren’t explicit enough about the right to a speedy trial, established in the Sixth Amendment. A speedy trial prevents a prosecutor from sitting on a case forever while keeping a defendant jailed and not bringing his or her case to court.
If the prosecution can’t make its case within a reasonable amount of time, the defense can ask for a hearing to “calculate” the time. And if, in the eyes of the judge, that period has expired, the defendant’s case can be dismissed. In reality, the district attorney almost never lets this happen, since it makes a prosecutor look bad to have time run out. It only works when the DA has lost one of the central witnesses, or if the state never had a case but didn’t have the guts to outright dismiss it. Only then will the DA let time expire under speedy-trial rules, so the rule can be blamed rather than the lack of a case.
While Sebesta dragged his feet, my only rec
ourse was to file a costly speedy-trial claim that would take a long time to process and that we stood little chance of winning. These technical maneuvers generally don’t win capital murder cases; the system, while supposedly blind, just doesn’t allow for that to happen. All it would do is burn more of my days while I sat in jail. The speedy-trial claim was a non-remedy posing as relief, so we never pursued it.
About two weeks after my pretrial hearing, I learned that the circumstances of my detainment would soon be changing. With my trial on the horizon, the state wanted to move me back to the local facility in my hometown of Brenham. On the surface, the plan seemed benign, even charitable. It didn’t occur to me at the time that maybe Sebesta was looking to try his luck with a new pool of snitches. The number of mythical conversations attributed to me had grown so large, I’d almost lost count. But the thought of moving closer to my family obscured any downsides.
As it turned out, Washington County Jail wasn’t much different than Caldwell. Sitting in my cell at Brenham made me reminisce about the life I’d been away from for two years. I missed the café where I would meet up with Yolanda and the nights we’d spent together. Because I’d always been an upbeat, optimistic person, my mind-set was that things would one day get better for me. I think that’s how I was able to stay positive then, and in the long years to come. My approach to life had always been to live until I die, and in between, I would enjoy the time I had.
Now that I was back in my hometown, I realized that I’d been disconnected from more than just the land that made up Brenham. I’d also been disconnected from its people. Most there knew me as the boy who’d pounded doubles into the gap on the baseball diamond and took an extra base when I could. I’d been an athlete, the sort of player blessed with potential that I never fully realized. I’d been outgoing, making friends easily at school and on the streets. My earlier squabble with the law was practically nothing compared to some of the things the police hung on poor black kids in my community. But what did that community think of me now? I hoped maybe Dennis, the guy I met in my holding cell as I was being processed into the new jail, could help me answer that question.
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